Journal
Welcome to the writings of Gathered: Storied Botanicals!
While the podcast is the focal point of Gathered, writing is my first love. And this love of writing tends to grow and wind around ideas like a tenacious vine. You’ll find these “tendril writings” here as excerpts of stories, essays, and other writings that have been bumping around in my head. Often they are extensions from the podcast, where I expand on ideas I couldn’t fully explore in an episode. Other times, these writings are stand-alone pieces of projects I’m working on. Whatever posts you’re drawn to, I hope that I can bring more flowers into your life through story.
To read these pieces in full, please head over to Substack and Medium where you can subscribe and get more flowers delivered right to your inbox.
Thank you for stopping by!
If ‘Gathered: Storied Botanicals’ Was A Flower…
September 11, 2024
It might be strange-looking—a perennial, likely shade-loving, preferring a cool place in a forest’s understory with the ferns and Jack-in-the-Pulpits. It strikes the viewer as zygomorphic (an orchid’s kind of symmetry), beguiling, a muted shade of apricot, and perfumed with an earthy or vegetal scent like a freshly cut dahlia stem. You might miss it if you were to walk by, but with keen eyes, you can spot it among the vegetation. It has deep, ever-growing roots and an army of diverse pollinators working to spread its seeds. It’s looking to propagate, to naturalize.
Artifact, Part 2
August 27, 2024
Back upstairs of our burned home, I carefully stepped through the remnants of ceiling that were now heaped on the floor of my brother’s childhood bedroom-turned-office-space. This is where I worked, where I kept my computer and writing. The roof’s skeleton jutted out, jagged beams reached skyward, and the computer monitors had melted away—my memory was the only evidence they had been there.
Artifact, Part 1
August 20, 2024
MEMORY. It is this vital element that links flowers and story. What writer doesn’t lean on a memory when creating a narrative? And just about every customer I’ve waited on in a flower shop is either actively marking a moment in time they hope to look back on, or they’re marking a memory that’s already been imprinted on them.
A Clumsy First Impression
June 9, 2024
I first started this inaugural Substack writing on Wednesday, March 20th. The spring equinox had just passed. I had released an episode of my podcast, Gathered: Storied Botanicals, that I was excited about. I had just put together a flower arrangement to promote my next floral design workshop at the end of April. The hellebores I had planted last year were blooming and flourishing. That fervor and reinvigoration we’ve come to feel with spring was unfurling on the page.
I had a draft started and walked away from it, intending to return that evening with fresh eyes to finish it. I never did.
That evening of March 20th my home burned down.
